Microkernels (WAS Re: New to the list)

At 10:12 AM -0700 8/5/06, Al Kossow wrote: You know, I was about to comment on that one myself. I personally consider my PowerMac G5 dual 2Ghz to be very closely related to an SGI Octane, but an improvement. It is most definitely a better design than my SGI o2's. I'd say the design is better than any of my better PCI-based Sun's (Ultra 60 and SunBlade 1000). Construction wise, my G5 beats any of them. The only place it is likely to loose out, is in Graphics. Unfortunately this does not include the OS. Solaris and IRIX don't hang the way that Mac OS X does. I've got so far as to try to get a IRIX system with very low spec's to keel over, and the best I could do was slow it down significantly but it was still very responsive. Of course I am talking about a Professional Mac, and not a consumer grade Mac. I must confess that I'm not that impressed with the consumer grade models. But then the closest I've ever been to a consumer grade Mac was my PowerBook 520c. Also that "suboptimal hardware" is used in Sun hardware as well. Take a look at all the cards on Workstations and you'll see that they're basically PC cards. It is things like the chipsets that make or break a computer. For example, last year we got a new server in that was purchased for our team by another group without talking to us. It was the most pathetic piece of **** I've ever seen come out of Sun. It totally crumbled under the I/O load that it was expected to handle, and could only handle 1/16th of the load it was expected to handle. It would have made a nice workstation (if it had a UPA slot), but it simply couldn't handle receiving data on one PCI card and sending it out another. It wasn't the PCI cards that were the bottleneck, it was the way the system was designed. For truly well designed hardware take a look at some of the IBM systems, they use PCI as well, but WOW! Also take a look at something like an HP DL380 G4, for a fairly nice Xeon-based system, though the onboard RAID stinks. Zane -- | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator | | healyzh at aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast | | MONK::HEALYZH (DECnet) | Classic Computer Collector | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, | | PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. | | http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |